What "women's health" really means

Which raises one irony to all this. By any objective measure, liberals are far more eager to use the government to make health-care decisions for women, because liberals want to make health-care decisions for all Americans — slightly more than half of whom are female. It’s Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg — not Michele Bachmann and Mitch McConnell — who want to tell women what they should eat and drink and how much they should exercise.

Conservatives want to leave it to women to make their own choices: about what to eat, whether to smoke, how fast they can drive, whether they can own a gun, etc. Many conservatives would also like to see women live long enough to have the chance to make those decisions, rather than be snuffed out in utero.

Of course, this argument will be wholly unpersuasive to the folks shouting the loudest about “women’s health decisions.” Which raises an even greater irony. The basic conservative or pro-life view is that abortion is different from other health-care decisions because there’s a harmed party other than the mother. This fact, not sexism or traditionalism or theology, is what trumps the general conservative preference for individual freedom. You don’t have an unfettered right to harm someone else.